The Verge has a nice piece on the history of the Walkman, which is apparently now 35 years old. I think I became aware of what a Walkman was sometime right before the yellow “Sports” version came out. I never actually owned a real tape Walkman, but had a few of the Minidisc ones and of course some CD players.

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I had the original. Mine wasn’t blue as the photo shows, but a cool smoked deep grey. It had two audio jacks (share away) and the big orange button attenuated the sound and activated a microphone — if someone spoke with you (your sharing partner, perhaps) while listening, you’d here all through your headphones. Volume was controlled by two L-R sliders, which was equally cool and tedious. I’ve owned a lot of Walkmans and Discmans, that was my favorite hands down.